A task with just a title and a due date tells you what needs doing and when. It doesn't tell you the budget, the client, the story points, or which stage of review something is in. Teams end up tracking that second layer of information in a spreadsheet next to the task tool, which defeats the point of having a task tool.
Custom fields solve this by letting you add whatever data your team actually needs, directly on the task.
A marketing team might track Client Name, Campaign, and Approval Status. An engineering team might track Discipline, Phase, and RFI Reference. A hiring team might track Requisition ID, Hiring Manager, and Interview Round. None of these fields exist in a stock task tool, because no single set of fields fits every team. That's the whole reason custom fields exist as a separate feature instead of being baked into the task template.
Most competitors offer a handful of basic types: text, number, date, dropdown. Workflo supports 27, including currency, rich text, signature, file upload, rating, and full name. If you need a client's signature on a task before work starts, that's a field type, not a workaround.
These get confused constantly. A dropdown is for a task that has exactly one status: it's either High priority or it isn't. Multi-select is for a task that can belong to more than one bucket at once, like a bug that affects both the iOS app and the API. Picking the wrong one either forces false precision or lets your data get messy. Workflo supports both so you don't have to compromise.
If every task in a project starts life as "Not started" or defaults to a specific team member, set that once as the field's default value. New tasks inherit it automatically, and nobody has to remember to fill it in by hand.
You can scope a custom field to a single project, or add it to your workspace-wide library so every project can use it. A field like "Client Name" probably belongs at the workspace level. A field like "Sprint Number" probably only matters inside one engineering project.
The test for whether you need a custom field is simple: if you're currently tracking something in a separate spreadsheet next to your task tool, that's the field you're missing.
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Organize tasks, collaborate with your team, and track progress, all in one place.
